Climate Climate & Energy

The line-up of legal issues

Lawyers and Supreme Court commentators hardly seem the type to camp out for tickets. But that's precisely what a line of expectant court-watchers will be doing one week from today -- braving early morning Capitol Hill in hopes of gaining entrance to oral argument in Massachusetts v. EPA.

Like a pre-game sportscast, today's post will attempt to give a flavor for points of contention -- in this case, the legal issues before the court. It won't be exhaustive. If you're looking for greater detail, refer to either the briefs or to this recent report (PDF).

The case involves a suit by Massachusetts and its allies (a coalition of other states and nonprofit groups) -- I'll refer to them as the petitioners -- against the EPA for refusing to use the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide emitted from motor vehicles. The petitioners lost (PDF) in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, but convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case.

When the Supreme Court decides to hear a case, it grants certiorari on specific questions. In Massachusetts v. EPA, the Court agreed to consider two:

‘Chaotic systems are not predictable’–Sure, but who says climate is chaotic?

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Climate is an inherently chaotic system, and as such its behavior can not be predicted.

Answer: Firstly, let's make sure we define climate: an average of weather patterns over some meaningful time period. We may thus discount the chaotic annual fluctuations of global mean temperature. That's weather, and one or two anomalous years does not represent a climate shift.

Quite a few people believe that climate is a chaotic system, and maybe on some large-scale level it is. But it is not chaotic on anything approaching the time scales of which humans need to be mindful.

The pop-punkers team up with NRDC on a new campaign

Pop-punk trio Green Day has partnered up with NRDC to help with a new campaign to Move America Beyond Oil. Via the website, visitors can send personal messages directly to political leaders, asking them to get behind solutions like improving fuel efficiency standards and setting more stringent CO2 regs for power plants.

And recognizing, perhaps, that "kids these days" are big fans of "the texting," NRDC has also added a new tool allowing messages to be sent to lawmakers and corporate leaders via cell phone by sending "GD" to 30644. (Standard text messaging rates probably apply.)

Below the fold, a video of Green Day talking about the issues and urging you to act. So get on your GD phone and do it already, if only for the I-just-texted-G-Dub coolness factor.

It’s more complicated than you might think

Most people interested in climate change have seen the plots showing strong correlations between CO2 and temperature going back several hundred thousand years:

FIGURE: Data from the Vostok ice core in Antarctica, from 410,000 years ago to the present. The top curve shows abundance of CO2 (in parts per million) from air bubbles in the ice core. The bottom curve shows the temperature anomaly in the Antarctic region, relative to the present, from isotopic measurements of the ice. After Fig. 3-6 of my book.

‘We can’t even predict the weather next week’–But weather is not climate

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Scientists can't even predict the weather next week, so why should we believe what some climate model tells us about 100 years from now?

Answer: Climate and weather are very different things, and the level of predictability is comparably different.

A cool new ad campaign from Victoria, Australia

This article, in which Al Gore lays out his basic position on nukes, contains nothing much new. He's said it all before in, among other places, our interview.

Thanks to Gristmill reader LA, however, for drawing my attention to this intriguing final bit:

Mr Gore ... yesterday met with [Victoria, Australia] Premier Steve Bracks and his deputy John Thwaites. He described Victoria as forward thinking on climate change and said he would take a number of local initiatives back to the United States.

He was particularly impressed with the Bracks Government's "black balloons" advertising campaign, which links household energy usage with the amount of carbon dioxide it releases into the air.

"I'm going to take that ad back and show it to some folks there, maybe put it on YouTube," he said.

Well, I don't know if Gore put it there, but the ad's on YouTube now. Here it is:

The End Is Sigh

U.N. conference ends with little progress on climate action In a monstrous anticlimax, the U.N. climate summit in Nairobi, Kenya, ended with a decision to … review the Kyoto Protocol in 2008. “From Christian Aid’s point of view that’s simply not good enough, and we need some heads to be knocked together by somebody,” said […]

‘Aerosols should mean more warming in the south’–More North. Hemisphere warming is well-understood

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Scientists claim that global warming from greenhouse gases is being countered somewhat by global dimming from aerosol pollution. They even claim that aerosol pollution caused the cooling in the mid-century. But GHGs are evenly mixed around the globe, while aerosols are disproportionately concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere. It follows that warming should be greater in the Southern Hemisphere -- but that's the opposite of what is happening. Clearly climate scientists do not know what is really going on.

‘Climate models are unproven’–Actually, GCM’s have many confirmed successes under their belts

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Why should we trust a bunch of contrived computer models that have never had a prediction confirmed? Talk to me in 100 years.

Answer: Given the absence of a few duplicate planets and some large time machines, we can't test a 100-year temperature projection. Does that mean the models can't be validated without waiting 100 years? No.

‘Models don’t account for clouds’–Clouds are complex and uncertain, but unlikely to stop warming

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Clouds are a large negative feedback that will stop any drastic warming. The climate models don't even take cloud effects into account.

Answer: All of the atmospheric global climate models used for the kind of climate projections synthesized by the IPCC take the effects of clouds into account. You can read a discussion about cloud processes and feedbacks in the IPCC TAR.